


take us to glory

by velvetcrowbars



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: I HATE SORMIK, M/M, Relationship Study, Spoilers, i'm so upset, jfc i'm so roasted, pls s a v e me, the spoilers are only heavy at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 04:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3596322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcrowbars/pseuds/velvetcrowbars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Mikleo reflects and counts the hours, days, and years from the time they began. From the time Sorey burst into his life in floods of green and blue and gold. </p>
  <p>He counts to how many more innumerable centuries until they can begin once more.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	take us to glory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> this is the first None hq thing i've written in god knows how long and boy howdy am i glad it's sormik (h e l p)

 

_(it’s been a long, long time since I’ve memorized your face)_

 

To Mikleo, there has always been three different kinds of silence.

He begins to notice them at the age of twelve.

Sitting in the small village library, the books crammed up against each other on shelves he could not yet reach the top of and the afternoon light pouring in through the long glassless windows, Mikleo finds this kind of quiet the easiest to recognize. This silence is buoyant, causing his bones to feel hollow, only weighed down by the pulse of his heart. Dust gathers against the corners of his eyes as he absorbs every delicate curve of the letters printed on the book’s pages. It’s comfortable here, settled beneath the notice of the rest of the world. Not that Seraphim are usually in danger of being noticed, anyway, but Mikleo allows his own small indulgences. One is that this is the place where nothing can touch him.

There’s a stir to his left. His train of thought catches when he remembers: _them_. Nestled among the books and leaf loose papers is the one place where nothing can touch _them._

(He hasn’t been a singular for a while. His entire life has almost always been _them_ , linked by some trembling hope of a future and mutual admiration that spans beyond anything he can understand at twelve years old.)

Sorey is sprawled out in his usual manner, his still-boyish limbs learning which way’s now most acceptable to situate themselves. Hair the color of hazelnuts they find in the woods when hunting together and fingers short and childlike as they turn the pages of the book balanced on his knee. When he glances up at Mikleo, he smiles with his whole body; Mikleo has found that some people are like that. Some people can smile with the touch of their hands or cry with a curve of their spine, and while Mikleo knows he is not one of them, he takes a bit of comfort in the fact that Sorey is.

“Mikleo?”

The book resonates muffled sound as his hand bumps against the page he had been reading. He is not used to being caught staring. His momentary shock manifests itself in a warm and dry heat in the space behind his cheeks. He despises it.

“What?”

Sorey shakes his head, the golden feathers on his ears bouncing and fluttering like small birds against his shoulders.

“Nothing. How’s the book?”

Mikleo looks back down at the paragraph he had left off on. Something about the documented history of the Hellions, all the fear and destruction they had caused throughout the centuries, how the Shepherds had saved them. Stories of beautiful failures and sacrifices, tales of blood-soaked hands and glorious victories. But, that’s exactly what they were: stories. Sorey adored them.

Mikleo does not care for heroes and heroines who put the rest of their lives away in a drawer and pretend that the fate of the world is more important than their own. Maybe that selfishness is why Grandpa always tells him to be more selfless, but he simply can’t find the logic in saving everyone while destroying those you love. It’s a stupid and thoughtless thing to do, leaving behind the people who care for you to pick up the pieces and paste them back together without you. Mikleo can’t believe in the saviors the stories make of some Shepherds.

He shifts so that his shoulder nudges Sorey’s, his softer white shirt folding and wrinkling with the midnight blue of Sorey’s. The muscles of Sorey’s arms are gentle, more sinewy supple than stable. His mind matches his body now, a boy at the edge of great growth, all playful romps and skin like the dappled shade of trees they’ve spent so many summers under together.

“It’s good,” he finally responds, because it’s not a lie. Just because he doesn’t like some of the characters doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate the alluring and trepid world they inhabit. “I like it.”

Sorey smiles again, a face-cracking grin that practically glows with the intensity of a distant sun.

“Really?!”

“I wouldn’t say otherwise if I didn’t think so.” Mikleo sniffs, just a little, only ever just a little when he’s with Sorey.

In one swift motion, Sorey is leaning his head on Mikleo’s shoulder, giggling softly. “Of course!” He pauses and looks straight at Mikleo’s face turned towards him, resting his chin on the edge of his shoulder like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

(Later, Mikleo supposes that it is.)

“I’m just glad you like it! You’re so picky sometimes so I wasn’t sure.”

“ _Hey_.”

“Kidding, I’m just kidding. But really-”

“Okay, _enough_.”

The first kind of silence is here, in the space between their gazes, their blood rushing with the knowledge of the world they thought they knew and places they thought they would never discover.

 

_(words are futile devices)_

 

The second kind, the more noticeable kind of silence, is born out of warm night and the dying embers of campfires. The nighttime quiet is something that Mikleo has always found a kind of belonging in. He fits in with sheets of inky black and the gentle song of crickets that weave their melodies through velvety dark starlight skies. He is one of the last awake, sitting and watching the last flickering licks of  fire.The need to draw into himself grows stronger. He cannot help but pull his knees up a little tighter.

There’s a rustle in the bushes, but Mikleo isn’t alarmed; he had felt his presence long before he enters the small clearing the group has nestled into, just below a cliff face and a massive valley of trees. Sorey emerges in a burst of loose leaves and more than a few small branches. He brushes them off with gloved hands and shakes his head rapidly, green foliage falling from him like the pieces of a broken crown. His eyes lite on Mikleo and there’s a tug, honest and familiar somewhere in his chest. It’s comfortable and unabashed, a thousand tiny daydreams tucked in a sliver of his soul.

Sometimes he forgets how much older Sorey’s gotten, how much he’s grown out of spindly, feather-light bones into something more sturdy. He’s broader now, in his shoulders and stance, and while his jaw is still slightly undefined, his features are clear and sharp like the reds and oranges of the sunsets they often watch together.

(More like the sunsets Sorey _coerces_ Mikleo into watching with him. It’s not that Mikleo doesn’t like sunsets as much as the next secretly sappy romantic, but there’s something about the way the dripping light of the sun casts its light on Sorey’s face, something in the way it floats like pools of liquid fire in his green eyes, that makes Mikleo feel a lot warmer than he should at the end of the day.)

“All clear?” he asks in a low voice, knowing that their companions are asleep and hoping they stay that way. If he’s being totally honest, as long as Edna and Zaveid, _specifically_ , stay asleep, it would be enough.

Sorey sighs the smallest huff of air as he flops down beside him, combing swaths of hair away from his face before flashing a thumbs up, the whites of his ever so slightly crooked teeth flashing in the dying campfire’s light. “All clear,” he echoes, settling into his spot a little more, sprawling and leaning back against his hands.

“No sign of any Taint for a while, it looks like. We got lucky.”

Mikleo allows himself to exhale and feels the suspended tension loosen its grip on his body. He fills his lungs again with the valley’s clean air and means it when he says, “Good.”

The quiet that isn’t _really_ quiet that comes with the moon and stars, humming and elastic in the air, envelops them. Mikleo keeps his gaze on the weakening fire in front of him. It isn’t until he feels, or more _senses_ , the twitch of nimble fingers at his sides that he flinches back, but by then it’s simply too late.

The laughter rises in his throat faster than he can stifle it down, and he turns to see Sorey full of unbridled mischief, darting his hands out to tickle at what he knows to be Mikleo’s weak spot at the top of his rib cage, just below his arms.

“Sorey, stop it. Absolutely no-AH-” He’s cut off by Sorey’s finger reaching under his chin, tickling there as if he were a cat. 

“Why do you even bother saying that,”--they’re both laughing now, Sorey struggling to breathe as Mikleo pinches his knees and that spot at the nape of his neck-- “when you know I never will!”

And with that Sorey launches himself, not too gracefully knocking Mikleo against the blanket they had laid out earlier. Mikleo’s surprise rushes out of his throat in exclamations and half-hearted protests; they pour into the night air, mingling with the melody of Sorey’s soft laughter against the skin on his collar bone. For a moment, it feels like they are no longer hidden away under a cliff caught between two types of death but back under a gentler, cloudless sky in Izuchi, smelling of pines and old leather book covers, hands still sticky with vanilla ice-cream. All at once, the wave of melancholic nostalgia is too much to bear but Mikleo has always been good at knowing the right time to feel things. Here, where they are smiling and near, it would be ridiculous to let things still possible, things still in reach, overwhelm him.

It takes a few minutes for the tickle fight to come to its end in the usual way: Sorey half-jokingly begging for mercy and Mikleo wrestling the smirk that quirks his lips.

He realizes that they’ve tangled all together, legs overlapping. Sorey is carding his fingers in quiet reverence through the fringe of Mikleo’s hair, pushing back near-luminescent strands to reveal the normally hidden small golden circlet, just touching the edges of it as if in fear it would shatter at anything stronger.

“Mikleo.” It’s barely a whisper, probably an echo uttered somewhere in the back of Sorey’s mind.

(Mikleo always finds Sorey’s name on his lips, waiting on the tip of his tongue, poised and ready. Why shouldn’t his be the same to Sorey?)

His arms circle tighter where they’re draped around Sorey’s neck and under his head and he shifts so that the only space between them is indivisible, negligible. Sorey’s thumb traces his cheekbone, the rise and fall of his breathing steady beneath Mikleo’s hands.

Mikleo hums to let him know he’s heard, that he’s still here, tethered to this point merely by Sorey’s existence beside him.

“I’m really glad you’re here, Mikleo." 

Sorey’s lips are chapped and familiar against his own, reminiscent of warm hearth stones and the brook they swam in when they were too small to know to know anything but what the village taught. They move in a practiced and painful honesty that brings back the tug from before as he curls his fingers in Sorey’s hair. They catch on the feathers that have remained a constant since they were children, two goldfinches nested beneath Sorey’s hair.

And while Mikleo cannot imagine a time when this will end, when he will cease to know the lines of Sorey’s hands by heart, no longer be able to see strands of dark hair out of the corner of his eye at any given time, there is still a locked away voice that knows: _This is what I would miss._

When they break apart it’s hard not to simply breathe into one another, lips ghosting and noses bumping. Mikleo faintly remembers what he was going to say before, a slick watered retort that rolls off his tongue and draws up the edges of his mouth in its realization. He opens his eyes into Sorey’s, feeling as if he’s bottled the stars in his veins. It comes out less as a jab then he intended, but it hardly matters when Sorey is so close Mikleo can see the flecks of brown in his irises.

“As if I’d ever let you save the world alone.”

 

_(and I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard)_

 

Mikleo is unsure of when the third type of silence makes itself known. It’s unlike anything he has ever known before, like drawing a wet blanket over his mouth or choking on the water that aligns itself to him. Foreign, unbinding, wild: _this_ is a silence he cannot control, is not even sure he would want to be able to control.

_“I’ll wait for you.”_

Mikleo strings four words together into some kind of patchwork promise, a pendant to wear around his throat, and measure the steps he takes one by lonely one. It’s feeble when compared to what Sorey must give: three hundred years of sleep, three hundred years of life and memories and _time_ he can never get back. The crushing truth of it makes Mikleo feel small, dwindled down to one moment among countless many, an insignificant fleeting second that cannot return. But Sorey knows him, every corner and lash, and he _knows_ when Mikleo is restless, can reach and brush Mikleo’s hair behind his ear and rest against his pulse.  

 _“I’ll wait for you,”_ doesn’t sound like enough, but it’s all he can say with the stone set of his face as they stand together, face to face and soul against soul. He wants to give more even if he knows it won’t benefit anyone. To give relentlessly; that is what he had come to think of his goal as. For Sorey’s sake it is an honor he's willing, _more_ than willing, to do. To stop his own clock and wait out frigid nights alone with nothing but the knowledge of _someday, we will have forever._ He could still give Sorey that, at least.

It was their dream from the beginning: A world in which Seraphim and humans may live together in peace was their dream from the beginning - a world they had both thought impossible and reveled in the fact that they, two opposite forces who, according to the laws of the universe, should not have met, would make it a reality.

But—that was impossible now. To do it together, anyway.

(Sorey understands. Mikleo knows he understands. When he nods and smiles it’s meant as a reassurance, but all Mikleo can feel is the whisper in his head, _ah, I will miss this_.)

_I will miss this._

Sorey, back arched, bow in hand and brows drawn together over razorblade eyes, lips pursed as if puzzling over all the questions of the universe. Long days when the sun stretched their small shadows and made them giants, made them invincible.

_And this._

Burning in his muscles, slipping on the rocks of ruins, exploring every alcove and ledge. Sorey with his wide eyes full of wonder, breathless and brimming with bliss that carries into his voice when he shouts, “Mikleo, come here, you won’t _believe_ what I found!”

_And this._

Splintered and hot desire as lips trail from the corner of his lip to the jut of his hipbone, Sorey’s breathing hitching against his shoulder, stroking his hair with petal-veined fingers and looking at Mikleo tucked against his chest, grinning that all-encompassing smile.

_I will miss him._

The silence of waiting, the weary game of patience. It is a virtue that Mikleo has never possessed much of, but this time it’s different. There is no choice but to treat it differently.

_“I’ll wait for you.”_

A promise grown into a mantra that simmers in perpetual reminder. It has carved itself into his bones and made its bed in his marrow, sleeping like a hero in his tomb, a souvenir of everything they were and everything they had the possibility to become.

As the first year turns to ten and twenty and a hundred it does not become any easier. Easier to bear, possibly, but no easier to forget. It sits in the middle of Mikleo’s mind like a boulder from an avalanche busted through his skull. But he sweeps up the damage the best he can and bandages his cut fingers because _he has to keep waiting._

He spends days that become months and years and centuries by bettering the lands in whichever ways he can, never getting too attached to any single place or person. He wants to give Sorey the world they had played out on their own in the comfort of their village. It’s unrealistic and childish and he thought that maybe after two hundred years of sleeping alone he would find himself more pessimistic, but remembering the reassuring press of Sorey’s thigh against his own, the never-ending days that will soon stretch before them, he finds it difficult to find grief in his life as it is now. Only waiting, flipping through lackluster memories like the pages of a book he has read already.

Mikleo watches Alisha and Rose grow older, holds their hands when they pass, watch as their children and grandchildren spring forth with the same exuberance they possessed, quiet and powerful as Alisha, strong willed and caring as Rose. He never really expected anything less. The other Seraphs drift in and out of his orbit as the years go by, and when they are present he may never say so, but Mikleo is grateful for Edna’s caustic tongue and Laila’s gentle gaze, Zaveid’s absurd outbursts.

The dull ache of longing runs its broken fingernails against his chest and steals the air from his lungs and makes living difficult, but never so much that it’s unbearable. It is always bearable because it has to be, because there is a second part to his promise that didn’t need to be spoken aloud, a secret knot they tied long before that first fateful night of Sorey’s endless sleep:

_I’ll wait for you, because I know we will always find each other._

_(but you are the life I needed all along)_

 

There is a fourth silence. A silence that is not a silence at all. The dark air is empty beneath Mikleo’s feet, left dangling like so many times before, and the hand warm around his wrist; calloused hands with fingertips he’s kissed time and time again with a scar on the wrist from something Mikleo no longer remembers. The wet drip of promise and secrets he could never forget, the glorious now that would take them up where divisions no longer mattered. His smile is like something out of the ruins; precious and time forsaken, untouched and a little bit guilty.

 

“Please,” Mikleo begins, looking up at a relic frozen in time, “pull me up immediately.”

 

Sorey wastes no time in keeping his promise.

  
_(I do love you)_

 

**Author's Note:**

> ok look, i can explain myself--- jsut liSTEN 
> 
> looks at [rib](http://archiveofourown.org/users/centricexit/pseuds/centricexit) because all of this is her goddamn fault and she is also the most lovely & perfect beta reader one could ask for
> 
> this is really dedicated to the entire twit tl, i'm so glad you're all here to join us
> 
> p.s. if you caught 'the song of achilles' reference, You the Realest, lets be friends


End file.
